Epic Review

Today I saw Epic by Blue Sky Studios.  It was pretty good.  I'll give it four out of five stars.

Epic is a beautiful movie.  The designs of the creatures and characters are brilliant and detailed with beautiful colors and shapes.  The characters were good and there was a decent amount of humor.  I heard some people complain that it had little plot, a symptom of most Blue Sky movies, but I thought it had enough.  Actually, I think it had more plot than most of the Blue Sky movies I've seen.  There was a little something from it missing that I couldn't put my finger on, (maybe the word is depth?), but it didn't detract too much from the movie for me.  The ending wasn't what I was expecting, but it ended well.  It had good themes, some of which were more obvious than others, such as we're all connected and you should never give up on your dreams or ignore the things that are most important.

If I could describe Epic in one word, it would be "pretty."  There's more to it than beauty, though, and I found it a very enjoyable movie.  It's definitely worth a watch.  I saw it in 2D, but I could tell that it had great potential as a 3D movie.

I want more stories from this world.

It's Campaign Time!

So, right now I'm playing as a character in a campaign run by my friend.  It's being loads of fun and I've drawn some for it.  My character is a thief called Jay Bird who has been passing herself off as a boy for many years.  She has flame-orange hair, a ton of freckles, and a troublesome/bratty attitude.  I love her.  :D  She has somehow also turned into the tank of the group.  So far she's gotten an arm broken, burnt to the bone on the same arm, tied to a bedpost while all her strength got magically sapped from her, poisoned and left for dead in an alley, mauled by a bear... and I'm probably forgetting something.

This is Jay all dressed in her boyish attire.  She had a pet rat at the start, but lost it pretty quick.

Here's what Jay looks like as a girl.  She doesn't like dresses.  Pants are much better for running away from things in.

This is Jay and the rest of the party.  They are, from left to right, Caylin, Sittaid, Jay, Chandra, Banen, and Sumi.

Jay first meeting Sittaid.  He blackmailed "him" into working for him.  Then Jay ran away that night.

Jay took Chandra, the priestess girl, out on a rooftop date to thank her for helping "him" with "his" broken arm the night before.

After getting burnt to the bone, then healed, Jay ran off to a brothel to relax and calm down from all the craziness.  Trouble followed the group, so the group followed Jay.  Jay was not happy about having her relaxation/dress-up time with the girl she'd bought for the night interrupted.  Sittaid's brain kind of broke  when he found out Jay was a girl.

Turns out the bad guys were trying to kidnap Chandra since she's apparently the daughter of Johnna.  That's Jay's mother's name.  It's a pretty rare name.  Chandra doesn't like the idea of being Jay's sister, and Jay has no idea what to think of it.

Sittaid logically decided that since Jay seemed to not like physical attention, the best way to discourage her from walking next to him in her immodest attire after getting soaked was to kiss her forehead.  It worked, but not for the reasons he thought.

Oh yeah, and Sittaid got spots on his nose from upgrading his sense magic for smelling.

This is how I would like Jay to be someday, or something along these lines.  We'll see how long it takes to get there.  This is also my most recent drawing of Jay, from around Christmas time, and you can see how much better it is than the very first on of Jay and Sittaid.  I'm improving!

Like I said, I am very much so enjoying this campaign.  I should draw more for it!  I should write up more of the story sometime to to share with you.  It really is fantastically fun.

Concept Design 2 - Chook's Story

After taking concept design 1 from Jake Parker, I took concept design 2 from Justin Kunz (2012 winter semester).  Justin used to work at Blizzard on their environment concept design stuff, and it was his first semester teaching at BYU.  He gave us the option of working on redesigning The Wizard of Oz for the class, or doing our own thing.  I chose to do my own thing and did concept development for one of the novels I'm writing.  It helped me to get me thinking about the story.  Lots of what I came up for for this class is already out of date for the story, but hey, it was good to work through.  Let's go through the environment stuff first.

First I did a bunch of castle silhouettes, then designed a couple castles I liked.  However, the castle in the book is now nothing like this.  The only thing that's similar to what's in the book at the moment are the adobe houses along the sides of the cliff walls.

Ok.  Let's move on to characters!

 First we have Chookery.  He spends a large part of the story stuck as a cat.

 Then we have head roughs for the demon king.  We're not going tho even look at his full body sketch... it's atrocious.  On the right we have the first full body sketch for Ruth, our heroine of the story.

This is Finna.  She didn't exist until this class, but wow.  She came into being and demanded a large role in the story.

As part of the final I redesigned Ruth and drew different outfits for her to wear over the course of the story.  She gets tan.

Then after the class was over I went and did a bunch of outfits for Chookery.  I should redo him.  I should redo all of the people.  I have improved a lot since I drew these a year ago.

Now, on to the animals and critters!  I think they're still pretty close to what's actually in the story.

This is Behemoth.  He went through a couple stages before I settled on the bottom blue drawing.

An ogre, and a troll.  They still need some tweaks, but overall I still like them.

 Dragons!  There's going to be dragons in the story.  Any good fantasy adventure needs them.

Unicorns!  We'll have some wild and dangerous ones, and some more tame and friendly ones.

And lastly, a dard.  I drew him after the class as well while I was writing over the summer.  Dard's are real mythical beasts, but of course I'm altering them to be what I want in my story.

So there you have it, a lot of my concept work for this class and my story.  I have improved a lot since then, but I still have a lot more to work on.  Upward an onward!

Concept Design 1 - Pinnochio Concept Work

This is some process work and the final products for my concept design class I took with Jake Parker in late 2011.  We redid Pinnochio for this class, more specifically based on the Disney movie, but I read the book to help with some ideas.  I went with something very, very different from both.

Warning:  Long post.  Lots of pictures!

First we have Gepetto's house.  I decided he was a wizard and trying to create a golem out of clay.

Then Pleasure Island.  It's a floating city in the sky.

Then we designed vehicles.  I cheated and designed a flying turtle.

Then a prop.  I decided to design the wizard's staff.

And now for the characters!  I designed the Blue Fairy, Monstro, and Pinnochio.  I decided to make the Blue Fairy a small, insect-like fairy.

Since Pleasure Island was in the sky, I decided Monstro should be some kind of sky dragon.  After a bunch of sketches I decided to go with something that was a cross between an eastern dragon and a gulper eel.

Then when it came to Pinnochio I thought it would be cool if he was made out of clay.  He would start out as a lump and become more and more person-shaped as he became more human.  I really like how he turned out... and yes.  I know that he resembles No Face from Spirited away.

Then as part of the final project we had to do two story moments.  I chose the Blue Fairy granting Pinnochio life and the escape from Pleasure Island.

Overall, I like some of my concepts and think that this could be a super-cool version of the story.  Maybe I'll play around with it again later, or take some of these elements and put them in a story of my own.